Originally Posted by joxer
So they will invest into something you pay for but you don't play it. And you're paying for something just because you feel like paying, you will certainly not play it?

Dartagnan, will you please sleep this over and rephrase it a bit?

I'm not sure what's to rephrase.

Whether I actually play Skyrim or not is irrelevant. The only thing they want to know is whether it's a financial success, so that they can "safely" invest in similar things in the future.

That's about the only certainty of the business aspect, and the principle you can be absolutely assured is the most widespread in this industry - as in all others.

However, there's still the wildcard called the actual developers

If you want to believe that launching from Steam makes a difference to the suits, then that's your business. The thing they CAN get from it, is that the more people launching from Steam - the more people are ok with having a slow piece of shit client taking up memory whilst playing games

So if you want Steam to be more popular, then by all means keep launching from it.

Whether I actually play Skyrim or not is irrelevant. The only thing they want to know is whether it's a financial success, so that they can "safely" invest in similar things in the future.

That's about the only certainty of the business aspect, and the principle you can be absolutely assured is the most widespread in this industry - as in all others.

However, there's still the wildcard called the actual developers

If you want to believe that launching from Steam makes a difference to the suits, then that's your business. The thing they CAN get from it, is that the more people launching from Steam - the more people are ok with having a slow piece of shit client taking up memory whilst playing games

So if you want Steam to be more popular, then by all means keep launching from it.

It's true, with Steam on my game crashes, without Steam it won't. Your statement however that it's slow and eating memory are not correct in my experience.

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
If you want to believe that launching from Steam makes a difference to the suits, then that's your business. The thing they CAN get from it, is that the more people launching from Steam - the more people are ok with having a slow piece of shit client taking up memory whilst playing games

So if you want Steam to be more popular, then by all means keep launching from it.

Don't forget about how STEAM was the cause of some of our….well mine….crashes. I got rid of that damn thing and launched straight form the exe and it works perfectly now. Not one crash.

Originally Posted by basharran
Your statement however that it's slow and eating memory are not correct in my experience.

Steam has come a long way from being a laggy, sluggish -pardon the pun- pile of STEAMing shit in the early days to an acceptable performer but it's still far from perfect.
I have caught Steam in the act a few times when I started my task manager to check on some thing or another and then found out it was using upwards of ~150MB of memory just sitting there, idling.
My guess is that is has to do with whatever ads they got on the front store page or maybe with bugs (= leaks) in the HTML/XML content. I have 8GB of memory so it doesn't really bother me but it still is kind of irritating and helps keep up the impression that Steam is far from the small, light, unintrusive client app that it should be.

I'm not going to open Steam for quite awhile. There is no way in hell I'm going back to crashing 4 or 5 times a session. I haven't crashed once since I started playing through the exe.

What I'll do is just wait for someone to make a mod that makes Skyrim playable without Steam. It's going to have to be done anyways so that the modders can use a script extender. They got rid of GFWL in Fallout 3 so they could use a script extender and I don't see why they wouldn't get rid of Steam to make room for better mods

So a month or so without any of my other Steam games is fine with me. The only two I really will miss are Dungeons of Dredmor and Dead Island.

BTW, this has taught me to NEVER!!!! have Steam automatically download updates. I thought it was a good thing at the time, but I'm switching it to "ask me first" the next time I start it. If I open it Steam now it will probably download it faster than I can say STOP!!!

Edit: Thanks for the heads up on what the update does. Without learning this ahead of time I would have started steam just to see if there were any updates yet and then been stuck in crash heaven again. Stupid fracken decision post an update to make us play through Steam when it's causing the problems. At least on my end it is. They sure are quick on the updates when it involves their program, but it takes forever and a day for any other updates.

Originally Posted by Thrasher
No kidding. At least you have the option now to save your unpatched executable. Mine got overwritten before I knew what I was getting.

I'm with you. From now on all, automatic updates are disabled. That had been my policy before, but I got complacent after my good experience with DE:HR.

I, too, was caught off guard. The moment I launched Steam, I received a message saying that Skyrim was successfully updated. No chance to change the settings, sadly.

To my knowledge, however, if you copy the original .exe file over the updated file, that should fix the "log in before you play" issue. People are commenting that the TESV.exe file was the only file affected from the patch, so you may be able to safely play if you paste over the new file. Personally, I wouldn't risk it. I'll simply deal with occasional crashing until this is patched. I'm still disappointed, but I wasn't expecting a patch of any sort until after Thanksgiving, so I missed my opportunity.

Has it been confirmed that people who "fixed" their crashes by circumventing Steam are back to crashing after the Steam enforcement patch? If not, I would not be so quick to assume that this patch sends everyone back into crashland. Unless this patch only contains a simple "if Steam does not run -> launch it" check, there may be a chance that they fixed whatever caused the crashes in the first place. The game crashing because of the requirement to run Steam was a very odd crash issue after all. I wouldn't be overly surprised if Valve stuffed up on the release EXE, realized their mistake, and now stealth-patched (no update notes to be seen anywhere, right?) the EXE to make it work with their client.

Stupid damn decision. Just let the customers play through the exe until they fixed this problem. How hard is that? Customers are happy because they're no longer crashing and they get some time to fix the actualy problem. Stupid fracken suits…..I like Steam, but it's nonsense like this that makes me glad I get games through GamersGate or GoG whenever possible.